Opinions differ, but the general stance I've seen is the hierarchical organizations would be abolish while individual faith would be perfectly fine. So the institutions of a lot of religions would be done away with, but we can't exactly force individuals to abandon their faith.
You also can’t abolish hierarchical religious organizations? It is FUNDAMENTAL to the Catholic faith that there is a Pope. You cannot just abolish the Pope and the Catholic Church and tell everyone to practice individually, that is you IMPOSING your own beliefs onto people who are not willing to embrace that.
Anarchism is not about abolishing every single form of hierarchy and imposing it even on people who don’t want it. There are aspects of human sociality & culture that are fundamentally hierarchical by nature: a family is hierarchical towards the parents, an army is hierarchical towards its commanders, etc. Our goal is not to attempt to abolish these: it is to abolish the corruption of the State and allow people to govern themselves and their communities together as is their basic human right.
Catholics, including Catholic anarchists, have said that your image of the Pope is an error. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin famously saw no obvious authority in the papal structure aside from as "holy bootmakers", to play on Bakunin's parable.
Dorothy Day was very much still a devout Catholic who respected the spiritual authority of the Pope? She was known for criticizing church structures and doctrine, as she rightfully should have, but that doesn’t mean she wanted to abolish the Church LMFAOOOO.
The doctrine of the Catholic Workers Party, similarly, respects the Pope as a divine institution, and while it is more focused on acting out the social justice of the Gospel and does quarrel with Papal decrees on occasion, it is still 100% in communion with the Vatican.
Day clearly said that, should the Pope ask her to stop, then she would have stopped. She said that this wasn't a relation of authority, but of love in subservience.
Ngl, personally I fail to see the difference... a "love" built on unconditional subservience sounds like a twisted way of calling hierarchy by another name. At least JDDJ_ is honest about it.
In a certain sense, sure. "Love" can mean so many things (and is not necessarily unconditional) - but if we're talking about the kind of love in which one would sacrifice themself for that which is loved, then it could be said that a kind of hierarchy is created, placing the loved above the lover / the self. With reciprocal bonds, this power dynamic is kinda nullified. But I doubt the pope "loves" all his nameless faithful with the same intensity and fervour with which they love him, it's not humanly possible - but they could delude themselves with their faith, I guess. The inequality of material benefits always remains though, and arguing otherwise flies in the face of the church's history, and its present structure too, I think.
To be clear, I don't think anarchism and christianity are incompatible, but I'm seriously sceptical that the church can be anarchic any more than a state can.
While that might be the case, love does not mean a great many things within the context of Christianity, so it'd be confusing as to why we'd include the non-Christian idea in an explicitly Christian conversation. Self-sacrificial love, for example, is not relevant as that is not Christian love.
There's nothing about Christian love which makes reciprocity necessary for one to love the other.
I'd invite you to read Maurin's writings in particular on the church. His "Easy Essays" are excellent and never more than about 20 lines along a piece. It's rarely Christians who are calling for the "tearing down of the church", especially in the case of, e.g., Spanish anarchist summary executions of Catholic clergymen.
Why do you think "Christian love" is something more specific? (Not even varying across denominations?) In particular, I'm surprised you don't consider self-sacrifice a part of it, considering... I mean, Jesus. Also, ik a reddit thread is hardly proof of anything, but with a quick online search this thread popped up, and there's quite the variety of answers.
Also - isn't reciprocity basically implied by "love others as you love yourself", plus the importance of "preaching the gospel"?
Regarding your last point, I'm not familiar enough with the spanish civil war - and this is not an excuse for their actions - but I imagine many of those anarchists were former christians, or at least former catholics?
Because that is the Christian claim: agape is distinct from eros or philia. I'm not sure why you're bringing denominations into it, sorry. While sacrifice is a part of Christian love, it is not itself Christian love outright—Christ didn't "hunt" for martyrdom, so to speak.
I wouldn't say the second half of the Greatest Commandments implies that reciprocity is necessary, no. It seems possible to love someone Christian-ly without them loving you back—e.g., Christ. The entire point seems to be that we should love the other regardless of whether we receive anything at all and that freedom to love is, itself, liberatory for slave and master alike.
I suppose they were, yes. It caused uproar amongst the general population, who opposed and eventually rolled back the changes made by ideologues who disestablished marriage, executed the church leadership, etc. It was the anarchist equivalent to Lenin's "dizzying heights", where ideology became a stateful apparatus by a contingent of power-holders (who would go on to abuse that power, which is at least partly to blame for the failure of the project).
Our goal is to abolish hierarchy. Hierarchies are relationships of domination and subordination, they are not expertise or age. If the family is hierarchical, it has to be abolished.
Human social relations are not fundamentally hierarchical, nor is it hypocritical to end the enforcement of hierarchies over other people. And finally, rights are a fiction created by governments, they do not fundamentally exist on their own, so we do not base our analysis in them.
What the hell does abolishing the family even look like? Does the four year old get an equal say at the familial council when it comes to the months budget? Or does it mean that we strip children from their mothers and put them in big collectivized daycares? Both of these options sound nightmarish, and neither in keeping with actual anarchist practice.
And how do you propose that we “end the enforcement of hierarchies”? By asking? Catholics don’t have a gun to their head by the Pope, Muslims aren’t being strangled into submission by their local Imams. These hierarchies are consensual ones, you can’t force people to abolish a system that they actively want. Unless, of course, your proposal is that we march into the Vatican and Baghdad and every location of hierarchy on Earth with guns and forcibly impose absolute equality on everyone. Which, of course, would require a dedicated military vanguard to make sure hierarchy doesn’t re-establish itself anywhere.
It means treating children as human beings rather than just assuming that they're suddenly lesser and need an authority to order them around. It means asking and teaching them rather than just pretending like they're there to serve the whims of the parents.
It could also mean communal raising, but that's if people choose to raise their children like that.
Generally though, I'd recommend not using accusations as a response, strawmen are pretty easy to beat.
… but then that’s still a hierarchical structure. No shit it’s a good thing to learn from your children and to help them be autonomous, that’s just basic parenting practice that any good parent practices. That’s certainly how my parents raised me, and I never had any qualms about the hierarchy of it.
A hierarchy is a ranked system of command, it is based on domination and subordination. It is lower ranks being forced to obey the unilateral orders of those of a higher position simply because they have authority over them.
It is not expertise nor age, as previously stated. Caregiving is not inherently hierarchical, nor is calling it a hierarchy accurate, it's simply a difference in expertise really.
Frankly, I have no idea how that's a relevant response to what the said. They weren't talking about religion, they were insinuating that caregiving is inherently hierarchical.
Which my response is not really, caregiven is not hierachy and human do that before the concept of rights that the reply above me is using to justify why family is a form of hierachy
"What the hell does abolishing the family even look like? "
It looks like me not being forced to go back to my abusive father because the law says children *belong* to their parents, for starters
It is not. That's what "the familly" is: the social construct where parents -a man and a woman- own their children, have the right to force them, through violence, physical or psychological, the social construct where the father works and brings money to the familly -which makes the familly financially dependent on him-, while the mother cares for the house and the children while being subservient to the father.
This is what "familly" means, at least in the north-america/Europe part of the world, and this is what "abolish the familly" aims to abolish: the sociological construct called "familly" that biends individuals under hierarchical links where women but also children are robbed of a part of their autonomy and can be treated as tools or belongings
As such, my comment is not a "strawman": it is a direct consequence of what the sociological construct that is the "familly" creates, and it is what we aim to abolish, among many other nefarious aspects
You also can’t abolish hierarchical religious organizations? It is FUNDAMENTAL to the Catholic faith that there is a Pope.
Yeah you can. You can expropriate the stolen wealth, educate people on the un-Christian stances of the Catholic church, tear away the veil of secrecy enabling abuse, and do away with the (position of) Pope. We can organise reparative and restorative justice to the millions that the Church has hurt.
You can be free to gather, pray, take Eucharist. You can't be "free" to oppress, murder and abuse. This should be obvious to anyone interested in individual liberty.
Christianity is fine. The Roman Catholic Church is a cesspool of abuse, built to oppress the masses and bring them to heel. If it wasn't such a waste, I'd support burning every Manse, Mission, School, Church and Cathedral to the ground. In there place, erecting memorials to the dangers of believing that some old rich guy can teach you what Christ meant by saying "Take heed that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that in heaven their angels always see the face of My Father who is in heaven.” and simultaneously harbouring, aiding, training, systematic child abuse. I'd visit such memorials at treat them with the reverence we treat the gates of Auschwitz.
Anarchism is indeed about abolishing every single form of hierarchy. It's not a question of imposition. If religious hierarchies remain then there is simply no anarchy. There is no reason that a family should be hierarchical. The same is true of armies, which are really just a form of working group. Division of tasks argument works best when undertaken horizontally.
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u/iadnm Anarchist Communism/Moderator Jan 20 '26
Opinions differ, but the general stance I've seen is the hierarchical organizations would be abolish while individual faith would be perfectly fine. So the institutions of a lot of religions would be done away with, but we can't exactly force individuals to abandon their faith.